Somewhat Abnormal: The Gospels

Gospel Truth

Robert Oerter

Is the New Testament factually inerrant?

The gospels give four different accounts of Jesus’s life and death. These four books are considered authoritative by essentially all Christians today. But different Christian groups regard that authority in different ways. According to some, the gospels are like four histories: each author tells the story of Jesus’s life according to his best knowledge, whether his own recollection or the (written or oral) reports of others. Others take the view that the gospel authors were guided by God in their writing so that they made no errors of recollection and incorporated no erroneous legends.[1] New Testament scholarship seeks to determine the relationships between the gospels without making any presuppositions about who the authors were, when they wrote, or whether they had divine assistance.

The popularity of the inerrantist view is undoubtedly one of the reasons Biblical scholarship is not more widely known and appreciated. Historical scholarship treats all texts the same, whether they are in the Bible or not; inerrantists say that Bible books have unique authority. Scholars make much of the differences between Biblical books; inerrantists seek to reconcile them. Partly this difference in viewpoint is due to the difference between doing theology and doing history, as discussed in the Introduction. In this case, though, theology and history cannot be separated. By privileging a certain set of documents over the others, the theological viewpoint of inerrancy is trying to change the way historical studies are done. There is no way to sidestep the issue: in order to proceed it is necessary to choose sides.

It is important to acknowledge before proceeding that there is more than one interpretation of “Biblical inerrancy.” According to some, the Bible is inerrant with respect to spiritual matters and doctrine, but not necessarily inerrant on historical events. This sort of interpretation doesn’t come into conflict with the historical approach to the Bible, and I will not discuss it further. The stricter interpretation of inerrancy is embodied, for instance, in the influential Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy of 1978. This document includes the claim that

Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.[2]

It is this view, and this view only, that I want to address.
In order to compare the hypothesis of inerrancy with the scholarly hypothesis that the books of the New Testament are historical documents like any others, we need a criterion capable of distinguishing between the two. Occam’s Razor provides the necessary criterion. Occam’s Razor can be stated in several ways; one version states “The simplest explanation is to be preferred,” another version is “Do not make unnecessary assumptions.” It can be difficult, though, to decide when an assumption is necessary or to determine which of several competing hypotheses is simplest. A better way to put it is this: if a hypothesis helps us make sense of a wide range of data then it is likely to be correct; if it forces us to continually introduce new assumptions it is probably wrong. Any additional assumptions which do arise (as they inevitably will) should be dealt with on the same basis: Do they explain a large body of data or are they merely there to explain away some difficulty raised by the original hypothesis? Are they self-contained, or do they proliferate still more assumptions?
Finally, all hypotheses and additional assumptions should be historically reasonable and based in actual textual and archaeological evidence. Any hypothesis that requires us to invent scenarios that go far beyond the data should be viewed with suspicion.

The Inerrancy Hypothesis
The claim that the books of the New Testament are inerrant immediately presents some difficulties. One of these follows directly from the discussion in the previous essay, Questioning the Canon: Which New Testament is inerrant? Is it the 23 book canon of the Peshitta, the Roman Catholic/Protestant 27 book canon, the extended canon of Ethiopian church, or some other collection? Without any definitive way to tell which books belong in the New Testament there is no way to tell which books should be considered inerrant. If the correct set of books can be determined a new problem crops up: Which version of each book is inerrant? All the existing documents of the New Testament books are copies of copies, a hundred years or more removed from the originals, and that these early documents disagree with each other. According to Bart Ehrman, professor of religion at the University of North Carolina, of the more than 500 copies of the Greek New Testament manuscripts, no two agree word for word with each other.[3] Many of these differences are easy to explain as simple copying errors, but others are more drastic. Not only are there significant changes in wording from one document to another, in some places whole verses or even paragraphs are missing or inserted.
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy acknowledges this difficulty in Article X:

We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy.[4]

Unfortunately, we possess none of the autographs – the original text as written by the author’s own hand. How, then, can we be sure of “great accuracy” in our copies? A major change could have been made by one of the early copyists, and if all extant texts are descended from that modified text we would have no way of knowing what the original actually said. The claim of “great accuracy” with respect to the autographs is not a conclusion of historical research, it is a statement of faith.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the issues of canon and textual accuracy can be satisfactorily resolved. How well does the inerrancy hypothesis explain the data? The gospels and Acts provide four versions of the events of Jesus’s life and death and will be the focus of the discussion in this essay. The four gospel accounts are very similar at some points and very different at others. Any satisfactory hypothesis must be able to explain both the similarities and the differences. Under the inerrancy hypothesis similarities are not surprising; it is the differences that need explaining.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the synoptic gospels, from the Greek for “seen together.” They are so similar in their structure, language, and ordering of events that they can be arranged side by side and “seen together.” The Gospel of John is quite different. John tells stories (like the raising of Lazarus) that the other gospels omit and omits events (like the institution of the eucharist at the Last Supper) that all the others include. In the synoptics, Jesus speaks in parables and short proclamations, in John he makes long speeches. The order of the events can be quite different, too. According to John, Jesus’s cleansing of the Temple occurred at the beginning of his ministry, whereas all the synoptics place it near the end of his ministry, shortly before his arrest.[5] These discrepancies don’t disprove the inerrancy hypothesis as they do not amount to outright contradictions. They do, however, raise issues that must be addressed. It is not surprising that four authors would choose different stories to record—but why this particular pattern of inclusion and omission? Why do three authors make very similar choices, while the fourth makes very different ones? The inerrancy hypothesis is of no help here. Why would God inspire three very similar accounts, and one very different account? The timing of the Temple cleansing can be resolved, too, for instance by assuming that there were two such cleansings. According to Occam ’s razor, this additional assumption weakens the inerrancy hypothesis. It raises another difficulty, too: Why don’t any of the four authors report both cleansings? The raising of Lazarus from the dead offers a similar difficulty: How could such a dramatic event be omitted by all three synoptists? It is not impossible, but it does seem highly unlikely.
The difficulties of the inerrancy hypothesis become even greater for events that could have happened only once: the death of Judas, for example. Matthew 27:5 says Judas “went and hanged himself,” but the account in Acts 1:18 claims he “fell headlong and burst open, and all his entrails poured out.” These accounts appear to contradict each other; nonetheless some have attempted to harmonize them. Judas, it is said, might have hanged himself from a tree at the edge of a cliff, and the rope or the tree branch might have broken. This might have caused Judas’s body to fall down onto some rocks and split open.[6] This proposal reconciles the two stories but only at the cost of introducing multiple assumptions: the “might haves” in the account. These assumptions have no basis in the texts themselves: no cliffs or broken tree branches are mentioned in either of the canonical accounts.

Moreover, the new assumptions are narrowly focused. They don’t bring together a large body of data; they only explain this one difficulty. Consider, for example, the question of the thirty pieces of silver that Judas received. In Matthew’s account, Judas returns to the chief priests and flings the money down. Acts 1:18, on the contrary, states, “As you know, he [Judas] bought a plot of land with the money he was paid for his crime.” Possibly these accounts can be reconciled, but it will require new assumptions. The scenario proposed for Judas’s death gives no hint of a solution to this problem. The assumptions made in that scenario have one purpose only: to protect the inerrancy hypothesis by reconciling the accounts.

Great volleys of verbiage have been launched over the issue of “Biblical contradictions.” These arguments are largely pointless, because in everyday speaking and writing people are imprecise in their use of language, and as a result almost any two statements can be harmonized fairly easily. Look at a third version of the death of Judas, due to Papias:

Judas lived his career in this world as an example of impiety. He was so swollen in the flesh that he could not pass where a wagon could easily pass. Having been crushed by a wagon, his entrails poured out.[7]

This story appears to contradict both of the other accounts, but does it? With a little imagination, we can reconcile all three versions by the same methods used to reconcile the Matthew and Acts accounts. Suppose Judas hanged himself over a cliff, along the bottom of which ran a rocky Roman road. Suppose further that when he hanged himself the rope broke and he fell into the road and was run over by a wagon, spilling out his entrails. Now, even the staunchest defenders of Papias’s historical accuracy never propose this scenario—it is too clearly contrived. It makes more sense to suppose that Papias is relating a legend that was circulating among Christians. But if this is the most likely explanation of Papias’s story, is it not also the most likely explanation for the stories in Matthew and Acts?

In addition to the issues of historical plausibility, harmonizations of this sort also raise issues of psychological plausibility. Let’s suppose that the harmonized scenario is correct. Can we understand why the two authors chose to describe Judas’s death as they did? Matthew’s brief reference to a death by hanging seems plausible enough as a short summary, but the account in Acts is another matter. If the author knew about the hanging it seems very odd that he didn’t mention it. If he didn’t know about it, then why does he know the details about the body bursting and entrails pouring out? Either way, there is a difficulty.

These harmonizations bring to mind the Vermonter who asked his neighbor what he gave his horse when it had the colic. “Well, I gave him oats mixed with molasses,” the neighbor replied. A week later the Vermonter met his neighbor again and complained, “I gave my horse oats mixed with molasses, and it died!” “Ayup,” replied the neighbor, “So did mine.” The neighbor’s answer can be called truthful only in a very narrow sense: so much of importance is omitted that it can hardly be considered an honest answer. Harmonizations that proceed by assuming that one or more authors simply omitted some of the information face the same problem. If we take the harmonized account to be the truth of the matter, then the account that was actually written (the Acts account, for instance) begins to seem woefully inadequate. If what actually happened was that Judas hanged himself, the rope broke, the body fell down a cliff, burst open, and the entrails spilled out, then simply saying that Judas “fell headlong” can hardly be called an accurate account.

The attempt to safeguard the literal truth of both versions of Judas’s death has produced a third version – the harmonized account – that is different from either of the Biblical accounts. So different, in fact, that it is hard to see either of the Biblical accounts as truthful and accurate reports of what actually happened. Inerrantists have managed to retain the literal truth of the Bible verses as written, but only by abandoning the accuracy of those accounts. In this sense, harmonization has failed.

The reader might not be impressed with the difficulties uncovered so far. Indeed, if the accounts of Judas’s death were the only problem for the inerrancy hypothesis, those difficulties alone would not be sufficient reason to reject it. After all, any historical reconstruction will have strong and weak points; any hypothesis will require some additional assumptions. The real problem with inerrancy is that there are dozens of similar discrepancies between the gospel accounts. Jesus’s birth, the miracle stories, his trial, death, and resurrection all involve discrepancies that must be reconciled if the inerrancy hypothesis is to stand. I can’t give a complete catalog of these discrepancies here as it would take up too much space.[8] To illustrate the problems that arise, here is a partial list of difficulties surrounding the events of Jesus’s execution.

Who interrogated Jesus?

· Matthew & Mark: The Sanhedrin, then Pilate.

· Luke: The Sanhedrin, then Pilate, then Herod, then Pilate again.

· John: Annas (the high priest’s father-in-law), then Caiaphas (the high priest), then Pilate.

What day was Jesus crucified?

· Matthew 26:19, Mark 14:16, and Luke 22:13: The day after the Passover meal.

· John 18:28: The day before the Passover meal.

What time was the crucifixion?

· Mark 15:25: The third hour (9:00 AM)

· Matthew 27:45, Luke 23:44: Sometime before the sixth hour (noon).

· John 18:14: Sometime after the sixth hour.

Miraculous events when Jesus died

· Mark 15:38, Luke 23:45: The veil of the Sanctuary was torn.

· Matthew 28:51-53: The veil was torn, an earthquake occurred, dead bodies rose from their tombs.

· John 19: No miraculous events reported.

Who went to the tomb on Sunday?

· Matthew 28:1: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.

· Mark 16.1: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.

· Luke 24:10-12: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna, and later, Peter.

· John 20:1-4: Mary Magdalene, and later, Peter and the disciple Jesus loved.

What did they see at the tomb?

· Matthew 28:2: An earthquake, and one angel sitting on the tomb door.

· Mark 16:5: One young man inside the tomb.

· Luke 24:4: Two men who suddenly appeared inside the tomb.

· John 20:12: Two angels inside the tomb.

Where and to whom did Jesus appear?

· Matthew 28:9: To Mary Magdalene and the other Mary as they were returning from the tomb.

· Mark 16:1-8: Jesus does not appear.[9]

· Luke 24: 1-8, 21-24: No appearance at the tomb; Jesus appears to Cleopas and another disciple on the road to Emmaus later on Sunday.

· John 20:11-14: To Mary Magdalene, outside the tomb.

How does this evidence square with the inerrancy hypothesis? The discrepancies between the four accounts cannot be attributed to the vagaries of memory and oral tradition, not if the gospels are “verbally God-given” as claimed in the Chicago Statement of Biblical Inerrancy. Somehow, all of these statements, no matter how seemingly contradictory, must be simultaneously true. All attempts to harmonize the accounts, however, involve numerous additional assumptions and produce a scenario which is wildly different from each of the individual gospel accounts.

John Wenham attempts a harmonization in his oft-cited book Easter Enigma.[10] To reconcile the accounts of Easter Sunday morning he needs to assume three separate angelic appearances (no gospel mentions more than one) and five separate appearances of Jesus on Easter Sunday (to Mary Magdalene, to the other women, to Peter, to Cleopas and another disciple, and to the eleven disciples—Luke is the only gospel that mentions two, the others only mention one), as well as requiring many assumptions about the details of the timing and location of events.[11] The resulting scenario has the women and the male disciples frantically running about and Jesus and the angels popping up and disappearing like the critters in Whack-A-Mole. This is hardly the picture painted by the gospel writers. If Wenham’s scenario describes what actually happened, then the four gospel accounts are “true” only in a narrow, literal sense, like the Vermonter’s “truthful” answer about his sick horse.

The psychological difficulties, too, are enormous. How can John fail to mention the dramatic appearance of the angels? Why is Matthew the only author who knows about the dead bodies coming out of the tombs? Most incredibly, how can both Mark and Luke omit all mention of Jesus’s appearance to the women?[12]

None of this seems to fit a text that is “verbally God-given.” On that hypothesis we would expect that the gospel accounts would be models of clarity and consistency. Instead, it is necessary to work very hard to avoid outright contradictions.

Another source of difficulty for the inerrancy hypothesis arises from comparison of the gospel accounts with non-Biblical accounts of the history of the first century. Luke 1:5, for example, tells us that Jesus’s birth took place “in the days of King Herrod,” who is known to have died around 3 BC. But in the next chapter we learn that Jesus’s family went to Bethlehem because of the census under Quirinius, which didn’t take place until 6 AD, almost ten years later.[13] These statements cannot be reconciled without introducing additional assumptions. There are only a few cases where gospel information can be checked by external sources. It is notable, though, that even those rare cases include several contradictions between Biblical and non-Biblical sources.

The inerrancy hypothesis seems to provide a very poor explanation of the New Testament texts as we have them. While it may be possible to reconcile all of the apparent discrepancies among the texts, as well as the discrepancies between the texts and other historical sources, those harmonizations always involve rewriting history on the basis of additional and largely unsupported assumptions, resulting in an overall picture that is at times quite unlike the picture presented in any of the individual gospels. Each of those assumptions, moreover, weakens the original hypothesis. Finally, the very need for such extensive harmonization would seem to contradict the idea that the New Testament is “verbally God-given.” Is there a way to make better sense of the gospels and their interrelationships?

The Analytical Approach

Is it possible to come up with a better understanding of the relationships among the gospels, one that relies on normal historical processes? That is the issue to be dealt with in the remainder of this essay. Remember that any hypothesis must explain both the similarities and differences between the accounts. There are three basic processes that need to be considered: recollections of eyewitnesses, oral traditions, and written documents.

The processes of memory have been much studied in recent years, but they remain mysterious. Our society places a high value on eyewitness testimony, yet research shows that memories are often unreliable. Surprisingly, this is true even of traumatic or emotional events. In one study, college students filled out a questionnaire on the day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in which they were asked to describe how they first learned of the disaster. Two and a half years later, 44 of them filled out a second questionnaire asking the same question. Researchers then graded the accuracy of the second questionnaire on a scale of zero to seven. One-quarter of the students scored zero, and half scored two or less; only three students scored the maximum value.[14]

Just as important for the analysis of gospel interrelationships is the issue of the verbatim recall. Two eyewitnesses describing the same event will choose different words. The same can be said of oral tradition. Short proverbs, like “He who laughs last laughs best,” can be passed along unchanged, but anything longer than a few sentences will not be remembered with word-for-word accuracy. Stories of traditional singers or poets who can recall hundreds of lines verbatim turn out to be wildly inaccurate.[15] Anyone who has ever tried to memorize poetry or Bible verses knows from experience how hard it is to achieve perfect accuracy. And here’s the crucial point: you only know you’ve achieved perfect accuracy because you have a written record for comparison. Without a written standard, oral repetitions are subject to correction only by someone else’s memory.

Practitioners of oral storytelling do not memorize long works and then repeat them verbatim. Rather, they work creatively with short, traditional phrases, changing the vocabulary and order so that each performance is unique. Here are the opening lines of a Serbo-Croatian song performed by the same singer[16]:

- Marko Kraljević is drinking wine…

- Marko Kraljević arose early/In his white well-built tower/In Prilip the white city…

- Marko Kraljević arose early/In his white well-built tower/Before dawn and white day…

- Marko Kraljević arose early/In his white tower of stone/He arose, began his brandy..

- Marko Kraljević arose early/In Prilip in his white tower…

(Three of these were recorded on the same day; can you tell which?)[17] Notice how the “white well-built tower” can become the “white tower of stone” or can be omitted altogether. Note also how, even in these few lines, the order can change: the tower can come before or after the mention of the city. In longer selections, changes of order can become even more apparent. Whole sections can be transposed as long as the logic of the narrative doesn’t forbid it.

Two indicators of written transmission can be identified from what we have learned: extensive verbal agreement and consistent order of events. This is the basis of modern analysis of the gospels. If two documents display these features then we can deduce a literary connection between them. That connection could have arisen in several ways: one author could have had a copy of the other document, or both authors could have relied on a third, earlier document. But the connection is through a written document, not through oral tradition or eyewitness accounts.

First Hypothesis: Markan Priority

Keeping in mind the characteristics of oral and written tradition, an analysis of the relationships between the four gospels becomes possible. We’ll begin with the synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Here are their versions of Jesus’s famous “take up his cross” speech:[18]

Matthew 16.24-28

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life? For the Son of man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay every man for what he has done. Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his Kingdom.’

Mark 8.34-9.1

And he called to him the multitude with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any one would follow after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? For what can a man give in return for his life? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of man also be ashamed, when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.’ And he said to them, ‘Truly, I say it to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.’

Luke 9.23-27

And he said to all, ‘If any one would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake, he will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But I say to you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.’

Unquestionably, the three versions show extensive verbatim agreement and a consistent order, the marks of a literary connection. The similarities don’t end there. In all three gospels, this passage is preceded by Peter’s declaration that Jesus is the Christ and Jesus’s prophecy of his death, and in all three it is followed by the account of Jesus’s transfiguration. Matthew and Mark both have the question about Elijah next, which Luke doesn’t have, then all three tell about the exorcism of a boy, followed by a second prophecy of Jesus’s death. In all of these passages there is considerable verbatim agreement among the different versions.

These patterns of order and verbatim agreement recur throughout the synoptics. It is impossible to explain them as the differing accounts of eyewitnesses or as the product of oral tradition. At least two of the three authors must have been working from a written document.

Try this experiment: cover two of the columns above and read through the remaining one. Read it several times if you like. Then close this book and try to write out the passage verbatim. (It’s not fair if you have memorized this passage in the past. Memorization requires a written document for comparison, as noted earlier. Pick a different passage, one of Jesus’s parables, for instance, and try it with that.)

How did you do? When I tried it (with Mark’s version) I got Jesus’s first sentence almost verbatim, though I forgot most of the introductory sentence. I switched the order of “whoever would save his life” and “what does it profit.” I left out verses 37 and 38 completely, but got most of the last verse. There was a fair amount of verbatim agreement in the parts I remembered, though many small words got changed. (For instance, “with power” became “in power.”)

How do you think you would do if you waited a day and then tried to write out the same passage? What if you tried to reproduce the longer section, say from Mark 8:27 to Mark 9:32? About 90% of Mark is paralleled in Matthew; about half of Mark is paralleled in Luke.[19] The parallel sections are rife with verbatim agreement. Only a literary connection between the three gospels can explain all this.

What, then, is the nature of this literary connection? Who copied from whom? The most commonly accepted view is that Mark wrote his gospel first, and Matthew and Luke independently used Mark’s gospel as a source.[20] This view is known as the hypothesis of Markan priority. According to New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan this view, first propounded in 1835 by Karl Lachmann, is now the most widely accepted position.[21]

Here are the main arguments in favor of Markan priority.

1. Mark as the middle term:

In those passages that appear in all three synoptics, verbal agreements between Mark and Matthew and between Mark and Luke are much more common than agreements between Matthew and Luke. In the earlier example, for instance, Mark and Matthew have “what can/shall a man give in return for his life?” which is missing from Luke. Mark and Luke both have a statement about being “ashamed,” which is missing from Matthew. Matthew and Luke agree against Mark only in saying “come after me” rather than “follow after me,” and in the omission of a few phrases, such as “this adulterous and sinful generation.”

This pattern is understandable if Mark was a source for Matthew and Luke, but it can also be explained by supposing Mark came last and used the other two gospels as sources.

2. The Double Tradition:

Passages that are common to Matthew and Luke but missing from Mark generally appear in different contexts in the two gospels. This makes it unlikely that Luke was using Matthew as a source, or vice versa. The next section will investigate the Double Tradition in more detail.

3. The order of episodes:

“If the relative order of the gospel episodes is studied… it becomes clear that there are virtually no places where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark.”[22]

This makes sense if Matthew and Luke are independently using Mark as a source. If Luke were using Matthew (either alone or in combination with Mark) as a source, we could expect that he would often follow Matthew’s order.

4. Mark’s style:

Mark has a quirky writing style that sometimes shows up in Matthew and Luke. For example, he has a penchant for sandwich stories, in which one story is interrupted by a second story, after which Mark gives the conclusion of the first story. A famous example occurs in Mark 11:12-21. Mark relates Jesus’s finding the fig tree with no fruit and cursing it (11:12-14). He then inserts the cleansing of the Temple (11:15-19) before returning to the fig tree, now withered (11:20-21). Mark uses this technique at least six times.[23] Matthew has only three of these sandwich stories, and Luke has only two, one of which is different from any of the ones in Matthew.

If Mark wrote first and the others copied him independently then we can see the sandwich stories as Mark’s fingerprints in the later gospels. Those authors didn’t care much for the sandwich structure and sometimes moved or eliminated material to get rid of it. Under any other hypothesis, the sandwich stories are very problematic.[24]

Once it has been established that Mark was written first it is natural to consider how Matthew and Luke edited and changed Mark’s text, and to ask if we can make sense of those changes. John Dominic Crossan calls this process redactional confirmation of a hypothesis, “redaction” being the scholarly term for the manner in which an author amends, edits, and adds to his or her source.[25] If the changes show a consistent pattern of editorial intent then the redaction analysis tends to support the hypothesis. If, on the contrary, the changes require many new, awkward assumptions about the author’s intent (Occam’s razor again), then the original hypothesis is weakened.

For more than 50 years scholars have employed redaction analysis in the light of the Markan priority hypothesis, and I can’t hope even to summarize their findings here. Instead I will display a few examples from Matthew for your consideration.[26]

Although he wrote in Greek, basing his gospel on the Greek gospel of Mark, Matthew was a Jewish Christian with a deep concern for Jewish history and Jewish law. This concern is evident from the very beginning of the gospel, where he adds a genealogy of “Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham.” (Matthew 1:1) In Matthew, the nativity of Jesus is told in a manner that makes Jesus’s life parallel Moses’s. Herod takes the place of Pharoah, ordering the massacre of all the male children just as in Exodus 1:15-16. The same editorial concerns can be seen in the small additions and deletions Matthew makes to Mark’s text. In Mark 13, Jesus warns of the coming tribulation and says, “Pray that it not be in winter.” (13:18) To this Matthew adds “or during the Sabbath” (24:20), showing his concern for the Jewish prohibition of travel on the day of rest. Where Mark interprets Jesus’s discussion of handwashing by saying, “Thus he pronounced all foods clean” (Mark 7:19), Matthew 15:15-20 retains the rest of Jesus’s words but leaves out this interpretive phrase. Matthew has no desire to see the laws of kosher food overturned; he simply skips over that line in Mark. The hypothesis of Markan priority makes sense of all these changes: they are all motivated by Matthew’s desire to tie Jesus’s story more closely to Jewish tradition.

The hypothesis of Markan priority organizes a tremendous amount of evidence into a coherent framework. It explains the extensive verbatim agreement between the synoptic gospels and helps us understand the order of the material. It gives us insight into the concerns of the later authors as they changed and adapted Mark. Scholars continue to debate the hypothesis, as they ought to do, and some still argue strenuously for alternative hypotheses.[27] Markan priority has been the most widely accepted and the most fruitful hypothesis proposed to date. It is a cornerstone of New Testament scholarship. If it is wrong, then all of conclusions based on it are wrong, too. But, as John Dominic Crossan reminds us, the same goes for any other hypothesis.[28]

Second Hypothesis: The Q Document

The gospels of Matthew and Luke are considerably longer than Mark. Using the hypothesis of Markan priority we can set aside those portions of the longer gospels that are paralleled in Mark and ask what is the relationship of the non-Markan remainder. This question leads to a startling discovery.

Here is an example of some of that non-Markan material in Matthew and Luke:

Matthew 23:37-39

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me from now, until you say,

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Luke 13:34-35

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say,

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

In this passage, which has no parallel in Mark, there is nearly perfect word-for-word agreement between the two gospels. There are many more such parallels, known as the Double Tradition, though not all of them have the same degree of verbatim agreement. Scholars of the International Q Project have identified 101 such passages.[29] What’s more, these passages appear in roughly the same order in the two gospels.[30]

Obviously we are dealing once again with a literary connection between the two texts. But who copied from whom? In spite of the general agreement in the order of the Double Tradition passages, the same passage rarely appears in the same context in the two gospels. The passage quoted above from Matthew, for instance, comes right after a different passage about persecuting the prophets that is also part of the Double Tradition. But Luke places this other passage in a completely different place (Luke 11:47-51). If Luke were copying Matthew, why would he remove this saying from its perfectly logical context and place it elsewhere? Careful investigation of the placement of the Double Tradition material has convinced most scholars that Luke could not have been using Matthew as a source, nor could Matthew have been using Luke.[31] The only remaining possibility is that there was another document (or documents) that Matthew and Luke drew on independently. This hypothetical document is known among New Testament scholars as Q.

The term Q has been employed in many different senses: for the Double Tradition material itself, for a collection of oral tradition, for a written document. Let’s be clear what is involved in the Q document hypothesis: Q was a document, written in Greek, that Matthew and Luke used independently when writing their gospels. This document is purely hypothetical – no copy of it has ever been found. It must have been written in Greek, because the two authors could never have achieved such a degree of verbatim agreement by translating independently from some other language.

According to Occam’s Razor, the need for additional hypotheses weakens the original hypothesis. Here, the need to introduce the Q hypothesis weakens the hypothesis of Markan priority. The latter hypothesis remains controversial among scholars for that very reason. But the Q document hypothesis is an entirely different matter than, say, the hypothesis that the rope broke when Judas hanged himself. Far from targeting one specific difficulty, it pulls together a wide range of data – 101 units of gospel tradition in each of the two gospels – and provides a coherent explanation for their existence, nature and organization. As with Markan priority, redaction analysis of the differences between the two versions provides support for the hypothesis. The Q document hypothesis is a powerful statement that can be tested through detailed analysis of the texts. Many scholars have become convinced of its validity through these detailed studies.

The Q document is a kind of gospel within the gospels. It had lain hidden in plain sight for almost 2000 years until scholars in the 19^th century began to suspect its existence. The content of Q is surprising as well. Apart from a few short narrative passages (such as the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness), Q consists almost entirely of parables and short sayings of Jesus. It contained, as far as we can tell, no account of the nativity, of the crucifixion, or the resurrection. It is entirely unlike the canonical gospels in which the sayings of Jesus are interwoven with a continuous narrative. During the 1950s this peculiarity of Q was used as an argument against it. No such sayings gospel was known from the early Christian period, the critics charged. Q proponents needed to postulate not just a single text but an entire unknown genre of Christian literature.[32] Ironically, just a few years earlier an amazing document had been unearthed, a document whose existence would turn this argument on its head.

In 1945 an Egyptian farmer discovered a ceramic jar full of documents from the 4^th century AD. The nature and significance of these works – known as the Nag Hammadi library after a nearby town – gradually became understood and appreciated, and today they are considered as important as the Dead Sea Scrolls for the understanding of early Christianity. One of the books recovered from the jar was titled the Gospel of Thomas, and it had a strangely familiar structure. It contained no account of the nativity, crucifixion, or resurrection, just 114 parables and short sayings of Jesus with little narrative. It was not the missing Q document (although there is some overlap in the content), but it proved one thing beyond a doubt: that the genre hypothesized for Q had actually been used by early Christians.

Such discoveries are exceedingly rare, and historians must usually be content with rearranging old data in new ways. Short of finding an actual copy of Q, more striking support for the Q document hypothesis can hardly be imagined. From the analysis of gospel interrelationships a hypothetical document had been reconstructed. That document required the existence of a previously unknown literary genre, the sayings gospel. The discovery of the Gospel of Thomas now confirmed that assumption. What had been seen as a weakness of the Q document hypothesis was suddenly transformed into a brilliantly successful prediction.

More Evidence

Our investigation of the synoptic gospels has led to a fairly detailed picture of the manner in which they were composed. Mark was written first. Matthew and Luke had copies of Mark and another document, Q, which they independently used in composing their own gospels. Neither author slavishly copied their source documents. Both creatively reworked their sources, each in his own way, to produce a new work with its own viewpoint and its own literary integrity.

None of the authors tells us anything about himself. One author, however, gives us a glimpse at his writing process. Luke begins his gospel by writing:

Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have reached their fulfillment among us, as these were handed down to us by those who from the outset were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, I in my turn, after carefully going over the whole story from the beginning have decided to write an ordered account for you, Theophilus…[33]

The situation is quite clear: Luke was not an eyewitness to what he is writing, but is relying on what has been “handed down.” “Many others” have already written their own accounts, and Luke has gone over these carefully in order to produce his own account.

These precious scraps of information accord well with the picture deduced from the analysis of gospel interconnections. Since Luke knows of many other accounts, he may well have used other sources besides Mark and Q. Indeed, after setting aside all the material that comes from Mark and Q there is a considerable amount of material in both Luke and Matthew that remains unaccounted for. Scholars refer to this material as Special Luke (or L) and Special Matthew (or M). Did this material come from oral tradition, from written documents, or from the author’s own creativity? We simply don’t know. Possibly it was a combination of all three.

So much for the internal evidence for the authorship of the gospels: what of the external? The earliest mention of any of the gospels by name comes from Papias, writing around 120-140 A.D. He says that Mark had not known Jesus but got his information from Peter. Our Mark certainly makes no claim to be an eyewitness, but neither does he mention Peter as a source. Later writers confirm the connection between Mark and Peter, so this was part of Christian tradition from the early second century on. It is hard to know how much this tradition reflects historical reality, however.

Papias’s remarks on Matthew are even more problematic. He claims:

Matthew compiled the sayings in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he could.[34]

Our canonical Matthew was written in Greek, based on a Greek Mark and Q. There is no doubt about this; the extensive verbatim parallelism would not survive translation. Moreover, the author was certainly not the disciple of Jesus. Not only does the author rely heavily on written sources, he never mentions himself in connection with any of the events he is relating. When he describes the call of Matthew the disciple (Matthew 9:9) he follows Mark 2:13-14 precisely, changing only the name of the disciple. If the author is describing his own personal encounter with Jesus, why does he merely copy what Mark wrote? None of this is credible if the author was the disciple Matthew.

In fact, Papias seems to be describing a document very unlike Matthew, a collection of sayings rather than a narrative gospel. Perhaps Papias knew of a document something like Q or the Gospel of Thomas.[35] The statement that “each interpreted them as best he could” may imply Papias knew of several Greek versions of some sayings gospel. In any case, Papias’s testimony is at odds with our hypotheses.

In deciding whether to stick with our hypotheses in the face of Papias’s remarks or chuck them and return to more traditional ideas of gospel authorship there are several points to keep in mind. First, the titles of documents tended to be somewhat fluid. The same text might appear with different titles, and unrelated texts might have the same title. As an example of the latter, the Gospel of the Egyptians that was among the Nag Hammadi texts is quite different from the book with the same title that was quoted by Clement of Alexandria.[36] So, Papias’s Matthew may be a completely different work than canonical Matthew. Second, until the late second century, Christian writers refer to these books simply as “the gospels,” “the memoirs,” or even “the gospel” as if there were only one.[37] It seems that the gospels circulated during this time as anonymous documents. It is only from the time of Irenaeus, around 180 AD, that the gospels begin to appear with their traditional names firmly attached.[38] Third, keep in mind Papias’s penchant for repeating wild legends, for instance the story about the death of Judas, and Eusebius’s evaluation of him as “a man of very limited intelligence.”[39] Papias himself declares his preference for oral tradition over written,[40] and in view of his uncritical acceptance of this tradition we should be cautious about accepting his statements as historical fact.

Overall, it seems we shouldn’t let Papias’s brief comment on Matthew overturn all our previous conclusions. Papias is either referring to a different book entirely, or he is repeating an inaccurate tradition about the origins of canonical Matthew. Later writers who make similar comments are probably relying on Papias or on the same oral tradition.[41] For the remainder of this book, therefore, I will rely when necessary on the two hypotheses, Markan priority and the Q document, as do a majority of New Testament scholars. Taken together, the two hypotheses are known as the two-source hypothesis.

The Gospel of John

John’s gospel is quite astonishingly different from the synoptic gospels. It contains many stories, like turning the water into wine, that are missing from the other gospels. Jesus’s ministry stretches over (at least) a three year period in John; in the synoptics it apparently lasts only one year. John’s Jesus speaks in long discourses, often speaking of himself in exalted terms and making spectacular claims like “I and the Father are one.”[42] In the synoptics Jesus makes no such claims, and his speeches consist largely of parables and short sayings.

John is strikingly different, too, in its literary relationship to the other gospels. There are no long sections of verbatim agreement – not one. Even in those places where John’s storyline is very close to the synoptics (as in the Passion sequence), the kind of word-for-word agreement that we saw in the synoptics fails to appear. Nonetheless, the overall outline of John is quite similar to Mark. Both begin their story with Jesus’s encounter with John the Baptist, although John prefaces this with a poetic passage on the heavenly origin of Jesus. Both end their gospels with the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and crucifixion and the discovery of the empty tomb, though here, too, John has some additional material. John’s Passion story even includes one of Mark’s famous sandwich stories: Jesus’s confession is sandwiched by Peter’s denial.[43] What are we to conclude? Is John dependent or independent of the synoptics? Scholars are divided: dependence, independence, and everything in between have been suggested. One possible solution is indirect literary dependence. Christians had a rich oral tradition, the importance of which has been emphasized by much recent scholarship.[44] The gospels may have been written to be read aloud. Literacy among the general population may have been only 10 or 15%, so for many, hearing the gospels read aloud would have been the only way of learning what they contained.[45] John may have learned the story of Jesus through repeated hearings or readings of one or more of the synoptics and then used his recollections, rather than an actual copy of the text, to guide him as he wrote.[46] (Recall that in using the name “John” there is no presupposition that the author was a disciple of Jesus.)

At any rate, the lack of extensive verbatim agreements between John and the other gospels means that the type of comparative analysis that was so fruitful for the synoptics is impossible for John. Fortunately for us, though, the author has left some clues about his method of composition in the text of the gospel itself.

To understand how scholars go about teasing out these clues, take a look at a gospel for which we know something about the sources the author used: Matthew. Here’s what the gospel tells us about the finding of the empty tomb:

But the angel spoke, and he said to the women, ‘There is no need for you to be afraid. I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said he would. Come and see the place where he lay, then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has risen from the dead and now he is going ahead of you to Galilee; that is where you will see him.” Look! I have told you.’ Filled with awe and great joy the women came quickly away from the tomb and ran to tell his disciples.

And suddenly, coming to meet them, was Jesus. ‘Greetings,’ he said. And the women came up to him and, clasping his feet, they did him homage. Then Jesus said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers that they must leave for Galilee; there they will see me.’[47]

A careful reader might notice something quite strange here. The angel says, “He is not here … he is going ahead of you to Galilee….” But then, two verses later, Jesus is there, in Jerusalem, not in Galilee! The angel, it seems, must not have gotten the memo.

This baffling illogicality gets an explanation when we compare Matthew with his source, Mark. Matthew has copied the angel’s speech almost verbatim from Mark 16:6-7. But Mark originally ended at 16:8, as we discussed earlier, with no mention of Jesus appearing to anyone. Matthew wanted to include Jesus’s appearance to the women, which he may have known from oral tradition.[48] At the same time, though, he was reluctant to alter the angel’s words as he found them in Mark. The result: the logical incongruity we noticed in the passage.

Logical glitches, then, can provide an indication of where an author has joined two sources and left the seam showing. Grammatical glitches give a second method of identifying seams. The gospel of John is replete with both, which scholars have employed to detect the sources used by the authors. Here are a few examples:[49]

· After the wedding at Cana and the miracle of changing water into wine, John declares, “This was the first of Jesus’s signs.” (John 2:11) The healing of the official’s son occurs two chapters later and is labeled “the second sign.” (John 4:54) But between these events we read that “During his story in Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he did….” (John 2:23) So the healing in John 4 can’t possibly be the second sign.

· At the beginning of John 5 Jesus goes to Jerusalem, where he performs a miracle on the Sabbath and then has a dispute with the Jews about it. John 6 begins, “After this, Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee…,” which is a long journey from Jerusalem.

· After a long speech in John 14 Jesus says, “Come now, let us go.” Then he continues speaking for three more chapters, so that it is not until John 18:1 that we read, “After he had said all this, Jesus left with his disciples….”

Using numerous such seams as indicators, scholars have attempted to reconstruct John’s sources. This type of analysis entails many more uncertainties than the analysis of the synoptics, where we have three complete texts to compare. Not surprisingly, there is much less agreement about John’s sources than about the Q document. There is a wide consensus, though, that the author used some kind of “Signs Source,” which he broke up and rearranged, causing the difficulty that headed the list above. Whether this source was a complete gospel or merely a “loose collection of traditional stories” remains in dispute.[50]

There is also fairly wide agreement that the gospel’s prologue, with its poetic form and distinctive style of expression, was intended to be sung as a hymn. John appropriated it to provide a dramatic opening for his gospel. The long discourses of Jesus, so different in style from his sayings and parables in the synoptics, may have been borrowed from another written source. The same has been proposed for John’s passion narrative. The nature and extent of these sources is not so clear, though.

One more point of general agreement is that John 21 is a sort of epilogue written by someone other than the main author. This follows from the fact that John 20:30-31 reads like a conclusion, and from John 21:24, “This [the beloved] disciple is the one who vouches for these things and has written them down, and we know that his testimony is true.” Whoever wrote this includes himself among the “we” who accepts “his” (the beloved disciple’s) testimony.[51] That is, the author of John 21 (let’s call him the final editor) believes that the beloved disciple wrote the gospel. In this he might or might not be correct – he gives no indication of how he knows this information. But obviously he is not the author of the gospel, nor is he the beloved disciple. The gospel was put in its current form by this final editor. Besides adding the epilogue, he may have added to or altered other parts of the gospel – indeed, he may be responsible for some of the literary seams mentioned earlier.

The Gospel of John, therefore, is thought to have been written in at least three stages .The Signs Source, whether a complete gospel or loose collection, was written first. The main author, the one we have been calling John, used this and possibly some other written sources in composing John 1-20. The final editor made some minor changes and added John 21. If this scenario is correct, then the final editor must be wrong: John was not an eyewitness but, like Matthew and Luke, an author who relied on written (and possibly oral) sources, who worked creatively with those sources to create a gospel infused with his own theology.

The earliest writer to discuss the authorship of this gospel is Irenaeus, writing around 190 AD. Since he is the first writer to mention all four canonical gospels by name, he is worth quoting on the matter:

So Matthew among the Hebrews issued a Writing of the gospel in their own tongue, while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel at Rome and founding the Church. After their decease Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, and also handed down to us in writing what Peter had preached. Then Luke, the follower of Paul, recorded in a book the gospel as it was preached by him. Finally John, the disciple of the Lord, who had also lain on his breast, himself published the Gospel, while he was residing at Ephesus in Asia.[52]

Irenaeus identifies the beloved disciple, the one who lay on Jesus’s breast (John 13:23-25), as John (the gospel itself doesn’t identify this disciple) and also as the author of the gospel. This opinion prevailed for most of Christian history. But when we probe the sources of Irenaeus’s information, things get murky. In a letter to Florinus, Irenaeus relates that, as a child, he knew Polycarp, who had known John, who had “seen the Lord.”[53] The one surviving letter of Polycarp doesn’t mention the author’s association with an apostle, however, so Irenaeus may be mistaken about this. Irenaeus also claims that Papias was an associate of Polycarp and had heard John speak,[54] but this, too, is questionable. What Papias actually wrote (according to Eusebius) was:

…whenever anyone came who had been a follower of the elders, I asked about their words: what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and what Aristion and the elder John, disciples of the Lord, were still saying.[55]

There is an ambiguity here. Is the “elder John,” clearly still living in Papias’s time, the same person as the John listed earlier along with the other disciples, or is this a completely different John? Regardless of the answer, there is no mention here of anything written by (either) John. As we saw earlier, Papias only knows of Mark’s gospel and a sayings collection written by Matthew. If Papias knew John personally, the omission of his gospel is all the more inexplicable. Neither Polycarp nor Papias can provide a solid historical basis for Irenaeus’s claim about the authorship of the fourth gospel.[56]

Not all of Irenaeus’s contemporaries, even those within the mainstream church, accepted the ascription to the apostle John. A Roman elder named Caius who wrote an anti-heretical treatise around 200 AD claimed that both the gospel and Revelation were the work of the Gnostic Cerinthus.[57] There may be something to this accusation: the gospel has close affinities with Gnosticism,[58] and the first gospel commentary of which we have any knowledge was written on John by the Valentinian Gnostic Heracleon (c. 150 AD).[59]

All of this external evidence for the authorship of John is late and unreliable, however. Those who wished to denigrate the gospel ascribed it to a heretic, while those who wished to inflate its importance ascribed it to an apostle. Eventually, the inflators won out over the denigrators, who were ridiculed and marginalized.[60] In time it was forgotten that a controversy over authorship had ever existed. The true authorship had been forgotten long before.

Jesus Goes to Hollywood

Historians deal in probabilities rather than certainties. It is rare indeed that a discovery like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Gospel of Judas comes along to swell the pool of data. Most of the time historians must be content to work with the very limited existing data, rearranging and reinterpreting it. Any historical reconstruction involves conjecture; this includes the inerrancy hypothesis. All that can be asked of it is that it explain the existing data better than the alternative hypotheses.

It is crucial to understand that, as New Testament scholar John Painter puts it, “there are no hypothesis free readings of the Gospel….”[61] Readers must make some decisions about the text, starting from the most basic: fact or fiction? Eyewitness or second-hand? These decisions remain completely arbitrary and unfounded until they are tested. How well does the hypothesis explain the features of the texts as we have them? Any reader of an ancient text necessarily becomes involved in the task of historical reconstruction. As John Dominic Crossan says, “If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in.”[62]

The combination of the Markan priority hypothesis and the Q document hypothesis is known to scholars as the two-source hypothesis. The basic claims are very simple: that Mark was the first gospel written of the canonical gospels, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark, along with a second document, Q, as sources when writing their gospels. A full appreciation of the strength of this proposal can only be obtained from a detailed, line-by-line analysis of the full text of all three gospels in the original Greek, with due consideration to all the variant readings in the earliest extant documents. That kind of analysis is beyond my abilities to provide (and, possibly, yours to endure); here I can only hope to have shown the sort of arguments that scholars use to support the two-source hypothesis, and to insist the patterns we have seen in brief among the synoptic gospels persist when the entire texts are considered. The two-source hypothesis is only one among many possible hypotheses, but, in the view of many (but certainly not all) scholars, it is the best one available.

The inerrancy hypothesis, in stark contrast, fails to provide a convincing explanation for either the similarities or the differences between the gospels. Why do three gospels share many episodes with nearly word-perfect agreement while the fourth has none? Why, if the texts are “verbally God-given,” don’t they agree in every detail? For each new discrepancy that crops up a new assumption must be added to explain it away.

Scholars from a wide range of backgrounds, denominations, and philosophical inclinations have rejected the inerrancy hypothesis and embraced the analytical approach. Whether Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, agnostic or atheist, these scholars agree that the New Testament texts should not be set apart in a privileged category but should be analyzed with the usual methods of historical investigation. This does not mean, of course, that these scholars always come to the same conclusions. Historical reconstruction in a world without time travel is always conjectural and the data are limited. Reasonable people can reasonably differ in their opinions, emphases, and conclusions. Ben Witherington considers most of the details of Easter week to be historical, while John Dominic Crossan considers them to be the result of later theologizing by Jesus’s followers, but neither of them insists that every detail is true.[63]

If the gospels are not straightforward eyewitness accounts, then what are they? Many Christians feel uncomfortable about scholars’ suggestions that parts of the gospel accounts were invented by the authors. This seems to imply that the authors were liars. Such an attitude, however, improperly imposes a particularly modern view of history on these ancient writers and, moreover, fails to recognize the purpose, or rather purposes, of the gospel genre. Without modern recording devices an ancient historian had no hope of giving a verbatim transcript of a speech or dialogue. As pointed out by the Greek historian Thucydides,[64] he could only attempt to capture the essence of what was said. Nor were the gospel writers attempting to write objective history. “No one who begins a biography of Jesus with the words ‘The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” or concludes an account with ‘these things have been written so that you might believe’ is attempting to be neutral about the subject matter,” observes Ben Witherington.[65]

Imagine that you are going to see a movie based on the life of, say, General Douglas MacArthur. You would expect the events depicted to reflect, by and large, events that actually happened. Some scenes, though, might be invented for dramatic or narrative reasons. You expect to hear some famous lines (“I shall return,” for example), but you certainly don’t expect the dialogue to be restricted to statements that can be documented as things MacArthur actually said. You hope to learn some history, but also to be entertained. You expect to gain some insight into the general’s character, even as you recognize this will reflect the opinion of the writer and director rather than the consensus of historical scholarship.

The gospels, perhaps, are something like the Hollywood version of Jesus’s life. They were written not just to tell dry facts about Jesus, but to interpret his life and his death for his followers, to inspire them, possibly also to bring outsiders into the movement. As the gospels were most likely written to be read aloud, they were probably also meant to be entertaining. To insist they are accurate in every detail is to make them into something they were never intended to be.

Somewhat Abnormal

Pages

The Gospels

Gospel Truth

The Analytical Approach

First Hypothesis: Markan Priority

Second Hypothesis: The Q Document

More Evidence

The Gospel of John

Jesus Goes to Hollywood

Further Reading

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